Personal development coaching for leadership and change

Life coaching, career coaching, executive coaching? Why personal development coaching?

I am often asked whether I am a life coach, career coach or executive coach.
My approach is about developing greater clarity and improved performance through a guided process of accelerated experiential learning and I work inside and outside organisations.

It is about becoming more adaptable and therefore more able to manage change wherever this change is happening. It is ideal for
anyone who needs to develop new ideas or novel approaches, whether because of new responsibilities, a desire to change direction, or just feeling stuck.

It is based around some key principles which apply to all of us:

we all have a basic urge and ability to learn

we all like to be understood

nobody is quite like us

What does this mean for me?

What this means is that we must focus squarely on the client: you, your agenda, your choices.
We will look at what you're doing, what you want to do differently and how you are dealing with that change. It's about real, focused, managed change: life change, career change, performance change.

But a coach is not a computer that calculates the "right" answer. In the same way as a sports coach cannot make someone run faster, Personal Development Coaching is about practice and about finding your own way.

Each session is specifically structured to help learn to look at what you have achieved in a different light, and from different angles. The result is that you get a better understanding of what you can and want to do differently and what you want to keep the same. This can be fairly exploratory at the start. As you clarify your objective, we will work together to set much more explicit goals. This is how we develop greater clarity of purpose and improved performance.

Sometimes doing things differently feels unfamiliar, even awkward (try writing with the hand you don't normally use for writing, or crossing your arms the other way round).
As your coach, I understand how that feels and I'm there to encourage and support you.

How long should I expect to work with a coach?

It's great being coached, and like all things, it has a natural lifecycle.

The point of personal development coaching is that you are learning to look after your own future. There is a point at which the professional coach - the successful coach - stands back and says, "well done". Discussing where this might be at the very start of the coaching process helps us both focus on an end point and makes sure it happens.